In his profile of Ruth Miskin, Peter Wilby falls for her view that teaching children to read English is quite straightforward - just a matter of establishing phonic rules (A tonic for the phonics queen, Education, April 1). As Wilby rightly states, Miskin is the "star of several TV programmes on reading" and is "riding high just now".

He's also right that her position was strengthened by the views of Jim Rose, a former director of inspection at Ofsted, whose report has indeed brought phonics to the fore, attacking the mixed approach of the national literacy strategy. The official government line is now that synthetic phonics, in which children build words up from their component letter sounds, is the only legitimate way to introduce them to reading.

But this view is far from universally accepted by those working in or researching early literacy. Faced with a class of non-reading inner-city seven-year-olds 40 years ago, my early career success came through a mixture of exciting texts, systematic phonics and a focus on rhyme and analogy. I have spent the intervening decades investigating this complex process, as well as teaching both children and student teachers.

Wilby states: "Research in Clackmannanshire found that, given 16 weeks of phonics when they start school, children's reading scores shoot ahead." This study has certainly been influential, but has also attracted criticism. The children scored well on word recognition over the seven years of the study, but much less well on comprehension. Certainly the decision-makers in Clackmannanshire did not see a heavy early dose of synthetic phonics as a magic bullet.

The phonic teaching was only part of a complex intervention involving large numbers of new books, a focus on comprehension and thinking, an ambitious home-school liaison programme, extensive literacy training for all teachers, rigorous monitoring, and support for the lower achievers. None of this is hinted at by Wilby.

Despite this broad initiative, the children in the intervention cohort did not score significantly better than their predecessors in the national reading tests taken in the last year of primary school. In their inspection report on Clackmannanshire, school inspectors observed that performance in reading was "below the average for comparator authorities".

In any alphabetic writing system, phonics provides an essential tool for word identification. But in English, phonics alone will not unlock such necessary words as "are", "was" or "could". Helping children to draw analogies between known and unknown words gives them a key to families of related words such as "would" and "should". Rhyme patterns like these don't work every time, but do have a higher success rate than synthetic phonics. Every child also needs a third key, careful guessing from context, when synthetic phonics and spelling patterns fail. This strategy has the added virtue of focusing children's attention on the meaning of what they are reading.

In general we're not bad at teaching children to read; but we're markedly less successful at teaching them to like it. Ruth Miskin and others who insist on synthetic phonics as the one route of entry into reading have little to offer to address this real problem.

· Henrietta Dombey is emeritus professor of literacy in primary education at the University of Brighton h.dombey@brighton.ac.uk

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